Quality control (QC) systems and methods for inspecting small articles frequently employ destructive testing not suited to in-process and/or on-demand fabrication measurements and assessments. Destructive testing, for example, can be economically infeasible for assessing quality of batches involving substantial quantities of small (micron range) articles, e.g., nuclear fuel particles. Nor can such systems be expected to meet the demand anticipated in future high throughput production processing.
Accordingly, new material inspection systems and methods are needed to reduce the number of independent measurements needed to qualify articles in a batch and further address quality control and assessment issues and thereby meet production throughput requirements.